A native of Yokrshire, England, Hughes often turned to the natural world for his poetry's symbolism and subject matter. In a 1995 interview with Drue Heinz for The Paris Review, Hughes briefly discussed the significance of this rural setting to his writing, recalling that his earliest memories involved animals, nature, and hunting with his older brother. The isolation of Yorkshire towns also meant that Hughes spent a considerable amount of time by himself: “On weekends,” he said, “I was off on my own. I had a double life.”
This emphasis on nature also situates Hughes' poetry within the history of pastoral and Romantic verse. Some of the poets whose echoes appear in Hughes poetry include John Milton, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Percy Shelley. Although the speaker in "Wind" differs greatly from Milton's shepherd in "Lycidas" and Coleridge's dreamer in "Kubla Khan," the poetic motif of a figure set in a landscape that often embodies a mind and history of its own carries over to Hughes' verse. Although it would be incorrect to simply categorize Hughes as poet of the natural world, we shouldn't understate this element's significance to the tone of Hughes' oeuvre, and its centrality to the themes his work explores. Nature is not merely a backdrop, but a plentiful source of characters and symbols throughout Hughes' poetry.
"Wind" isn't the only poem in Hughes' first collection, The Hawk and The Rain (1957), that makes heavy use of natural imagery. Some notable examples include "The Jaguar" and "The Thought-Fox." Crow, Hughes' fourth collection of poetry, fuses Christianity, folklore, and mythology to tell the story of Crow, the volume's primary figure. Flowers and Insects exclusively explores natural phenomena. Often, it's the darker side of Nature that makes an appearance in Hughes' work: from extreme natural forces like "Wind" to the religious overtones of Crow's brutality, Hughes' nature isn't the kind of place where you'd plan a weekend getaway. The natural world is wild and savage, a lingering echo of what man was long ago—and might become again, in the absence of order.
Like the "double life" Hughes felt he lived as a child, the levels of symbolism imbue his poetry with a kind of double life, too. While "Wind" represents nature's power and intense human emotion, themes of sexuality, death, and religion are frequently explored through nature's ruthless, brutal, and uncompromising world.
